Mike Boyink from Train-ee is hosting the first ever classroom led instruction of ExpressionEngine (EE) in Holland, Michigan.  I stumbled across EE about two years ago, after thinking I was going to become a bad #!*$ developer overnight, and reading every book I could on web development.  After comparing content management systems, I chose EE.  What I found two years ago, was there were not many tutorials, or trainings on EE.  Yea there was the documentation and four start up videos, but it seemed like something was missing, I was still was very unsure of how to really develop an ExpressionEngine site. I put EE on the shelf and went in a different direction of building systems from scratch(or attempting anyway).  I still new that EE was the tool to be using, especially for clients websites, although may not be the most popular, I re-visited ExpressionEngine again.  This time while trying to find tutorials, I found Mike Boyink, and his books on ExpressionEngine.  This is exactly what I had been looking for.  After reading and watching the screencasts, I finally have a better understanding of EE, but like always I had some more questions. Continuing to research, I saw Mike Boyink was offering a workshop on ExpressionEngine in September.

I knew I had to take advantage of this and I had to find a way to Holland, Michigan.  When I saw there were two scholarships available, I couldn’t believe it.  I think it is very rare that organizations these days, when the economy is down, and greed is high, that not one, but two scholarships would be offered, especially for such a small venue.  This is a community I definitely want to be a part of.  I applied but didn’t win, but I am still going to Holland, Michigan and that is all that matters.

I finally have an opportunity to interact with a well known ExpressionEngine mentor, and other EE users that are in the same position as me.  I’m pumped to have any opportunity to learn EE, but more so that the experience will be a small classroom setting, rather than a large event type that are normally hosted.  Nice choice Mike!  I will be sure to share and report on the event while in Michigan.

This is the agenda Mike has laid out:

We’ll have four days in the classroom - and the scheduled training will run from 9:00am to 4:00pm (breakfast and lunch will be provided).  From 4-5pm you can ask questions, get feedback on your own EE project, or bail early to go catch up on email before heading out again.

Specifically we’ll cover the following:

* Installing ExpressionEngine
* System Overview
* Control Panel
* Loading an existing design template into EE
* Chunking the visual design into parent and embedded templates
* Passing variables to embedded templates
* Designing an ExpressionEngine architecture to power the visual design
* Implementing EE weblogs, custom fields and categories to hold content
* Building dynamic navigation menus
* Building page titles and setting navigation states dynamically
* Creating content relationships
* Using EE conditionals
* Using plug-ins
* Implementing a Contact Form
* Implementing the EE search engine
* Implementing an different content types (TBD)
* Setting up the site for client access